Young Sesshoumaru
by Tirielle
Summary: A short story about Sesshoumaru, and two meetings that changed his life.


Disclaimer: Inuyasha and all its characters belong to Rumiko Takahashi, not me.

Sesshoumaru—young, ten year old Sesshomaru, who would be around six in human years, has skipped his training and is wandering in the woods near the castle.

To young Sesshoumaru, 'near' is less than five miles away and yet still far enough for an adventure.

He adventures.

He walks as quietly as his ten year old self can manage and he finds beetles (boring) and animals (who run away) and humans (who scream and yell "demon!" and smell funny).

His papa talked about humans once. He said that they were good and not-that-different and even if they were fragile they weren't that bad because they could _think_.

Sesshoumaru isn't seeing an awful lot of thinking. At least the birds made different noises.

There's one little girl, though, who Sesshoumaru thinks is kind-of-maybe-okay-looking, and she stares at him for a full second before blushing.

She follows him.

He lets her.

* * *

Sesshoumaru sneaks out sometimes and goes and plays and just-so-happens to run into the kind-of-cute girl almost every time he goes to the forest.

The girl is small and fragile and bleeds when she gets scraped and it takes so long to heal that Sesshoumaru is quite almost-worried (because he worries about nobody) that she might break one time and then she won't come back because Sesshoumaru can't fix people like his papa can.

Her voice is nice, though, and after a while she starts to talk to him, and she has a good sense of when to talk and when to be quiet and when he looks at her she beams like the sun.

* * *

The girl (who told him her name but he didn't like it because it was a common name and she was special) was waiting for him this time.

The moment he shows, up, she bows, straightens, smiles, and starts chattering.

She's talking about soldiers this time, and how brave they are to go to war, and Sesshoumaru smiles just a tiny bit because he'll be _in charge_ of his papa's soldiers one day and won't she be so impressed?

* * *

She isn't here today, and Sesshoumaru isn't worried, but he goes straight home.

There's no point being here without her.

* * *

Sesshoumaru smells fear. He's smelled it before, when someone tried to kill him last year. He wasn't scared- there is no place safer in the whole _world_ than his father's castle- but the 'sassin' reeked of it the moment the guards looked at him.

Fear smells icky.

He also smells the (his) girl.

* * *

This is where the smell ends. It's a tiny village and everything's on fire and the smell of blood is filling the air and it smells wrong because he can smell _her_ somewhere in here.

Blood usually smells good. But this blood is her blood and suddenly Sesshoumaru is worried that she really did break and she'll be gone forever and she'll never smile again and then suddenly he's looking down at her body in the ashes.

He can't even do anything about it, really, because it's too long for his papa to fix her and he can't get revenge because humans did this and nobody cares when humans kill humans.

Humans are stupid. Stupid, selfish creatures that destroy and kill and they go and die on you and you can't do a single thing about it because they're so fragile and they break and…

And if they hurt this much then they're not worth the pain, not at all, and he'll never care about humans again.

* * *

It's several hundred years before something different (new and unexpected and not nice at all) happens to Sesshoumaru, as he gets defeated by his little mongrel half-brother.

If nothing else, it is a change from the last few centuries, which can be summed up as "kill-slash-kill-conquer-kill"

Tenseiga pulses at his side and everything fades to darkness.

* * *

He's back at _her _village.

The humans fixed it up again, of course, around 50 years after the… incident. Human delusions of ghosts and curses only keep them away for so long (real ghosts and curses work much better).

He hasn't been here for a long time. A tiny voice in the back of his head remarks that it's not that he's avoiding it, per-say, but he just didn't have a reason to return.

A tinier voice mentions how good he is at lying to himself.

* * *

She doesn't speak. Of everything, it's her silence that makes her bearable.

She tries to help him. She can't.

Sesshoumaru is the strongest, so he must heal with his own strength.

* * *

When he can move again, the he smells _her_ blood. Which, really, is completely impossible. Even if he hadn't discovered her body (broken, bleeding, burnt, dead, gone), it's too long for a human to survive. After so long, she is more than likely into her next reincarnati—

Oh.

He moves faster (runs).

* * *

He stares at her corpse for half a second—half a second more than he would give anyone else—and ignores the toad (as usual). Beneath the scent of dirt and feces and blood and gore is her smell, something he hasn't smelled for 532 years (not that he was counting). The scene has an unpleasant sensation of déjà-vu, but surely, this time, it's different?

Tenseiga gives a hiss and a pulse as he draws it from its sheath.

She opens her eyes and smiles like the sun.

She follows him.

He lets her.

* * *

Author's note: Okay, first story... ever. I'm not really sure about the ratings and categories yet, so tell me if you think it's in the wrong one ^^;.


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